In a week and a half UNP will be exhibiting at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs’ (AWP) annual conference! The AWP Conference & Bookfair is the annual destination for writers, teachers, students, editors, and publishers of contemporary creative writing. Enjoy a sneak peek of the UNP books you can grab there.

In Shift, a personal inquiry into midlife lesbianism, Penny Guisinger examines sexual and romantic fluidity while wrestling with the ways past and present intermingle rather than staying in linear narratives.

We will be hosting an author signing with Penny Guisinger on February 9th at booth 1334/1336 from 3:00-3:30pm as part of our programming. Mark your calendars!

Imperfect Rings

Sitting cross-legged on a bed in a Super 8 motel, I am following instructions on the internet in a weird, desperate exercise to get my hands around my story in a physical way: to create something I can hang above my desk as a reminder that beginnings are often indistinguishable from middles, and sometimes there’s no ending. I cut two thin strips of paper, then tape their ends together to make two separate rings, then start cutting the third. Borromean rings are mathematical impossibilities: three perfect rings linked in such a way that if you cut one, all three fall away from each other. They can be drawn but cannot be created in real life without warping at least one of the circles. To interlock, one of them must cock a hip or shift its weight to the other foot.

I tried for years to impose order on this story. I conceptualized it as a tryptic: before, during, and after. Humans like sets of three. We like musketeers, blind mice, little pigs, wise men, rings in a circus, sheets to the wind, pieces in a suit, little kittens, legged races, and bears. Ready, set, go. Rock, paper, scissors. Bacon, lettuce, tomato. Life, liberty, happiness. Stop, drop, roll. Location, location, location. Wine, women, song. Father, son, holy spirit. Students of writing, painting, and public speaking are taught the rule of three, which says that three is intrinsically more satisfying than four or two. Nobody knows why this is true.

The bedspread in the Super 8 is patterned with blue circles of assorted sizes overlapping and intersecting over a brown background. I cut a third strip of paper. Using an online illustration as a guide, I slide it over one ring, under another, back over the first one, then under the last one, then I tape its ends together, and I find that it’s true. The three paper rings are a little lumpy and weird looking, but they are joined in a three-dimensional, three-part telling of something that cannot be depicted with one straight line. The strips of paper, no matter how they have been turned and looped into this new form, are still strips of paper.

A Mobius strip might be a better expression of this story than a set of three rings if not for its status as a two-dimensional phenomenon. It has no boundaries, no beginning, no end, and cannot be oriented. If you were to become two-dimensional and walk the length of a Mobius strip, you would end up where you started, but the trip would involve some trickery and for a time you would be upside down. For a time, you would be a mirror image of yourself existing on the same surface as the original you. When you reached the end—also known as the beginning—you would find yourself exactly as you started but perhaps different for the flopping about you experienced along the way. A German-born mathematician named Burkard Polster, who runs a YouTube channel called Mathologer, describes the trip around the Mobius strip like this: “You won’t feel it. You will feel perfectly fine all the way throughout the trip, but you come back strange.” Polster tries to explain that it’s possible that you will return from a trip around the half-turn as a mirror image of yourself. A trip with no edges, with only one surface, one direction, can flip us around but leave us otherwise intact.

I adjust my position on the bedspread and take one breath to realize that the number 8 in the Super 8 logo is also composed of rings. It’s possible I’m thinking too much. My misshapen, crinkly set of Borromean rings dangles from my hand in the dim motel room light.